Mobile Apps In Health

Part II: Remote Medical Diagnostics in PyS60 MUK - Faculty of technology Mobile Engineering Focus Group (Research & Development) Research:Mobile Health Applications Victor Miclovich Appfrica Labs [email protected] [email protected] November 13, 2009

Contents

2 Anatomy of our RMD tool

cialize open source products3 . It is during the lectures that we shall look at snippets of code. 1 An account on GitHub will be set up for this project. For versioning of content we shall use 2 Git4

3 Costs, Costs, Costs

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4 Backend and Interoperability

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1 Remote Medical Diagnosis

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Remote Medical Diagnosis

Remote medical diagnosis is defined as the 4 identification of the illnesses of a person without the benefit of a formal medical examination. But it is better to put it as Abstract ”an identification by a physician who has not himself fully examined the patient”. This paper described the research that is unRMD is an area with a lot of promise and has derway in the field of remote medical diagbeen called many names from ”telemedicine” nostics. I have chosen to use PyS601 because to ”mobile health”. of Python’s agility and ease of use as a programming language. Over these series of paThis small article is to open up the minds pers I shall be going through the developmenof this group. I hope you guys get more ideas tal overview of the RMD2 under Python; they and encouragement5 . shall describe the technologies we shall use 3 as a team. And probably this shall be open like servicing and provision of deployment 4 sourced. There’re still good ways to commerThose that know SVN can still use it; there’s a 5 Assignments of tasks to the team

great plugin called svn-git that allows you to migrate SVN repositories to git. 5 try to get as many S60 phones... not just Nokia,

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Python for S60 2 Remote Medical Diagnostics

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Anatomy of our RMD tool

Alice may want to take a sound recording of the patient’s cough... chest murmurs can signify heart disease and many other human ”bugs”. She may also prefer to take a video recording while documenting her fears and suggestions to a distant physician.

This is an overview of how a person in the ”field” can use this tool. Some MIT6 students designed Moca which is a platform that does a similar thing but on the Android platform. We are doing one that is based on the Symbian OS but using Python. We shall add more features as the development continues.

The TechnoRMD8 should have a sense of location... this is to save Alice time, she This is a tool with great promise to Devel- should focus on just taking the necessary oping nations and Developed ones too. details. The application (TechnoRMD) should All a person in a really remote area has to do is do the rest. In essence, TechnoRMD will have have a phone with him; a smart phone is pre- an LBS9 feature.. ferred to just the SMS-Voice-only-type phones. With this phone, the user can type out a problem or issues of concern such as:

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• Name of person • Age

Costs, Costs, Costs

Costs are one of the most important issues in the build of this application. But I am not referring to financial costs. Well, maybe just a bit. But according to certain laws10 , I am sure this venture is viable.

• weight • sex • temperature readings

Back to the important concepts here. The cost that I refer to here are technological costs: such as the cost of bandwidth in terms of reliability. We are seeing and being witnesses to the rates of data transfer almost doubling or trippling... the monetary costs are almost down11 . Low Internet costs rules out the weight that ”Costs” has here. So that leaves me with only addressing the

• etc. In addition to that list, the user (in many cases, this could be a nurse), may have to take pictures of affected areas or the diseased body part7 . Palpations and colorings say a lot in the medical world. The pictures could be of eyes... the color of the pupils, the constrictions of the iris. Medical data is immensely rich and inaccuracy can cause many problems or worsen the existing ones.

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For want of a better name, I think we should call this venture/tool something like TechnoRMD 9 Location Based Service 10 Moore’s law:The processing power of a microchip doubles every 18 months. Corollary:compters become faster - and the price of a given level of computing power halves - every 18 months. This just means that the costs are going to go down significantly. 11 Orange Telecom, for example lets a customer with an Internet enabled phone, surf the Internet at the cost of less than a soda which is less than $0.5

Let us call this user or nurse Alice; this is for reasons that may help simplify ambiguity and the gravity of the problems this can solve. Samsung has got some, just do some investigation 6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 this could be the skin around a malignant patch on a breast

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reliability of the connections to all forms of ”Internet-Data connectivity” such as:

3. Multi-modal transfers: this application should allow the Symbian phone access to all possible Internet ”access”... Multimodal just means many modes and that means we can use all options that the device supports:

• GPRS • USB tether • Broad band Wimax12

• GPRS • Wi-fi over BroadBand

• Wi-fi (when close to a free-public wifi )

• etc.

• SMS and MMS (the textual data can be sent using SMS )

In many remote places in Africa, connectivity is still not that good. So this leaves us to use interesting techniques. Some of which I got from Moca app’s design. So what do we do to ensure a reliable data connection and data transfers:

• USB tether (this just means, you can connect to a PC or laptop with Internet access, and just have your cached data sent)

1. Synchronization: this refers to the use of existing storage of the Phone. That’s just a database, right? So, we shall now start thinking of solutions that give us cheap and reliable storage. Also, we have to embed a background listening service that should check cellular coverage and as soon as the it is available, data is uploaded.

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Backend and Interoperability

For this app to work well enough. We shall use a three-tier type design. A three tier is a client-server architecture in which the user interface14 , functional process logic, computer 2. Packetization: the medical data I de- data storage and data access are developed modules, most scribed earlier is pretty heavy and so this and maintained as independent 15 . often on separate platforms. cause the data transfer or upload to a server to take some time... and think of This is the design pattern that we shall use. the number of individuals that might be in line waiting their turn for ”inspection” by The client side is the interface on your phone; Alice... Yeah, I know that look, they are this is can include stuff like a couple of forms so frustrated if Alice’s phone has got is- (single text dialogs), popup-menus and lots of sues. So we can design several algorithms other stuff. But, by now you should know that that will locally queue all this data of dif- the mobile device is really ”LIMITED”... I ferent individuals before sending it off. So should be shouting this loud. Alice can go on with her even if there’s no But being limited does not mean that the design should be fake! or so uncool! The client cellular coverage13 . will never communicate directly to the data 12

WIMAX: Wireless Inter-operable Microwave access This will take some more ”tech” stuff to put down; this involves IP programming, SSH programming for security, playing with data protocols in order to boost efficiency and reliability. 13

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what we see) This definition is got from Wikipedia; there are some cool drawings, check them out. Just search for n-tier or three tier 15

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Figure 1: This is an image of a 3 tier system tier or database. It will use a server that will be running OpenMRS16 .

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Assignments of tasks to the team

We shall have this task of setting this app up compartmentalized. In the following ways: 1. Team lead 2. User Experience Designer 3. UI designers... about two of them can do. 4. And other coders!

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OpenMedical Record System is a well development system that supports stuff that deals with medical data

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